Jane thanked her husband for the lesson and the primer, in Italian, and left to help Hannah in the kitchen.
As scrubbing floors required one to be down on one’s knees, Hannah decreed that German, the language of force and conscientious labor was in its correct setting to be learned. Hanging wash, on the other hand, could lend itself to learning that a W was not a V—that is, when one remembered to take the clothes-peg out of one’s mouth first. Jane, a true linguist, eventually became quite proficient in German, although for the rest of her life, she retained a slight Yiddish cadence when speaking it and though Hannah did finally master her “whats,” “wheres,” and “whens,” th remained her unconquerable enemy forever.
In between chores, Jane waded through her primer and thought how utterly boring; but plodded on diligently until she arrived at Lesson L-1 and, suddenly, everyone was replaced by “the Lord and all His so Holy Goodness” and took over the text like punctuated clobber onto the mind. That stopped her cold and she switched to deciphering the old newspapers that were kept bundled up in the attic. Whenever a little time could be stolen, feeling guilty yet determined, Jane would creep up there, sit on the floor beneath the low-slung roof and teach herself to read in English. She found many interesting things had happened the year before. A Mr. Wilson, with a strange first name, had been elected as a president; the greatest ocean liner ever built, an unsinkable “Floating Palace,” on her maiden voyage had struck an iceberg and sank with the loss of 1,503 lives—a real millionaire among the dead, heralded as “The Tragedy of the Century.” Another gentleman had actually reached the South Pole and a place called Boston had defeated New York in something called the World Series. 1912 intrigued her so, she couldn’t wait to go back further to find out what 1911 had been like—but that would have to wait. She had still so much to learn. What she really could not decipher, she skipped—hoping it would clarify later when she knew more and could come back to it.
Whenever her husband inquired how she was coming along with her McGuffey’s Eclectic Reader, adding that he would be disappointed in her if she failed to follow Mr. Ford’s so excellent curriculum, she lied in Italian, assuring him of her dedication to its contents. Once she nearly made a slip, when, at the breakfast table, Johann, the Hollander, asked what street Mr. Ford’s house was on and she blurted, “Sixty-six Edison Avenue in Detroit. Well, last year anyway,” having just the day before devoured an old society section. When everyone stopped eating and stared at her, she tried to cover quickly by explaining she must have overheard it while listening to some ladies gossiping at the butcher’s. Fortunately Hannah let the coffee boil over just then and that diverted the men’s attention.
After supper Jane usually took her mending downstairs to work quietly in the parlor. While the men talked, she listened—pretending that she wasn’t.
John lit his cigar, leaned back in his chair expelling a bluish haze that joined the air already thick with the smoky aromas of assorted tobaccos.
Stan Bartok, fanning a lit match across the bowl of his pipe, mumbled, “John, I don’t agree with the whole idea. The damn place is in an uproar. It’s chaos! What’s wrong? Our work no good—no more?”
The men of the Geiger Boardinghouse, whose life’s blood not only financially but emotionally was their involvement with Ford, were split as to the merits of the revolutionary idea that was being tested, implemented in specified sections of the plant. Rudy Zegelmann, his black eyes snapping, for once their seductive gaze erased, agreed, “Damn right! So what do I do? Just stand there? Wait for my little chassis to arrive, pinch it on the behind and wave bye-bye? No way to work!” Cursing in Austrian dialect, he took a small pouch and paper from his coat pocket and began rolling a cigarette.
“Oh, Rudy, come on! Now it takes twelve and a half hours to assemble a Model T. If the Boss wants it quicker, new ideas maybe work. Watch and see!” said Peter Clutovich who since his congratulatory encounter within the pages of the Ford Times, was known to have a doglike loyalty to his masters that bordered occasionally on blind adulation.
Stan Bartok turned to John. “You always know statistics. Last season, how many Ts did we turn out?”
“Seventy-eight thousand four hundred and forty.”
“And what’s the goal now?”
“Two hundred sixty-seven thousand, last time I heard—but demand is more!”
Jane nearly gasped out loud, the men smoked in silence. John flicked the ash off his cigar.
“What’s wrong with bringing the work to the men—instead of the men to the work? That’s how the meat packers do it in Chicago!”
“Come on, John. Assembling an automobile that has more than five thousand parts is not like cutting up a dead cow!” Carl Baldechek grunted.
“Why not? We are talking about piecework—precision piecework—every action timed … individualized. My God, man, can’t you see it? Thousands of men in stationary motion. Every movement controlled, timed by the rhythm of a line that is moving! Jesus, Carl, that’s the future!”
It was times like these that her husband’s passionate enthusiasm reawakened Jane’s first memories of him and she found, once again, how attractive this made him.
“Listen,” John continued, “you’re the one who knows it works, Carl.”
“But when they set up the line to move and gave twenty men the twenty-nine separate operations, what happened?”
“We turned out one hundred and thirty-two every hour,” Carl answered begrudgingly.
“Of course! I saw the results on paper. One man needed twenty minutes before the assembly line moved. After it was put in motion, it took thirteen minutes ten seconds. My God, can’t you see what that means?”
Stan stroked his moustache, shaking his head, “I still don’t trust it.”
“And who’s going to set the speed?” Stan challenged.
“Ja!” Fritz joined the discussion. “With orders already more than what we can produce, Mr. Couzens for sure now will want that kind of speedup quick for all operations.”
Sensing a slight censure in Fritz’s tone, John hastened to comment. “Henry Ford knows what he is doing. Trust him.”
“Sorenson is the one to trust. If it can be done, he is the one who will do it for sure!” Carl corrected him.